Skateboarding, whether recreational skateboarding or competitive skateboarding, involves a skateboarder riding on a skateboard and performing one or more tricks using the skateboard. Skateboarding is one of the fastest growing sports that already has over 20 million skateboarders worldwide and, more particularly, is the third most popular high school sport behind basketball and football. Currently, there are over 1,800 skate parks in the United States, which has significantly increased from about 200 skate parks in 1996.
However, while skateboarding has become a professional sport (e.g., in part due to the X-Games, the Dew Tour, the Maloof Money Cup, etc.), competitive skateboarding remains a difficult sport to watch for the casual viewer. Oftentimes, the casual viewer does not understand the subjective scoring system that one or more judges award to particular riders/competitors. More particularly, both the casual viewer and the rider/competitor have little understanding as to scores that can be achieved for performing particular tricks or combinations of tricks.
Furthermore, competitive skateboarding may have reached a saturation point. The competitive formats in skateboarding provide a non-exciting event that lends itself to a rider performing a repetitive trick or a combination or tricks. In addition, current formats lead to a rider only skateboarding and performing tricks to his or her strengths and/or capabilities. For example, a rider that is not known to ride switch-stance performs a trick or a combination of tricks riding switch-stance and, as a result, the one or more judges acknowledge this and award a higher score to the rider than if the rider performed the trick riding in a regular stance. This is also lost on the casual viewer.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for approaches that overcome these and other deficiencies of the prior art.